After 8 years on the waiting list, as of this summer I have a slip in Santa Cruz Harbor and my Colgate 26 is here, home, at last.

For the last several years she has been in charter service with Club Nautique in Sausalito while I waited for the slip to come in. Now that she’s finally home I’ve been fixing some of the damage from the charter service. Chartering is a hard life for the boat, she gets used often mostly by novices and for them it’s a “rental” so there’s not a lot of care. Fortunately the Colgate 26 was designed and built specifically for training so it can take a lot of abuse. I always expected to have to do some cleanup to bring her back to top shape, but some of the things I’m discovering as I go through the boat are shocking.

The gooseneck mount is nearly torn off the mast. Probably, I can only speculate (Club Nautique never told me about the accident), due to a violent jibe.  In any case, instead of fixing the damage, Club Nautique put two hose clamps around the mount and the mast to hold it in place!!! Unbelievable.

After I removed the hose clamps the full extent of the damage was visible. Of the six rivets, two were gone and the other four were completely lose. I drilled out the remaining rivets and need to decide how best to fix this properly (the existing holes are too elongated to try to use the same size rivets again). The bracket itself shows some stress cracks as well.

Update: Ballenger Spars built me a nice custom bracket to replace the damaged part, it has a different shape so the rivets fall farther apart to avoid the damaged holes in the mast.